Now it's possible to have some kind of protocell with some form of metabolism without any genetic heredity. It's possible in principle. Is it alive? - Nick Lane

Even the laws of thermodynamics... can be recast in terms of information — Shannon entropy, the laws of bits of information. But this view generates its own paradox at the origin of life. ...Place information at the heart of life, and there is a problem with the emergence of function ...the origin of biological information. There are problems... in understanding why we age and die... diseases... and how experiences can give rise to conscious mind. ...A far better question ...what processes animate cells and set them apart from inanimate matter?

I've had long and sometimes difficult discussions, especially about the singularity of the origin of Eukaryotes... A lot of people don't like that. ...[I]t's not really about what does it say about the probability of life elsewhere, although it has things to say to that. It's really about life on earth, and a lot of people are very uncomfortable with the idea of improbability... I've had quite difficult discussions with some students about that, but rarely... about life elsewhere in the Universe.

We've had some success and quite a lot of failure too. ...[T]he problem we're having... is reproducing the successes we have had. The big problem... for anyone working on this is that hydrogen gas is not soluble in water at atmospheric pressure. What we really need to do to make this work is to ramp up the pressure in the system to 300 bars and then we need a continuous flow. For this to work you need a across a barrier. Then it should work. We don't know, and we haven't got the funding to build a high pressure reactor. We're collaborating with a group in Utrecht to do that. ...If we can do that experiment and then it fails, then my confidence that this would be a suitable possible origin of life would take a serious knock.